“I had a sense that they don’t know each other,” director Mary Nighy says of Jonnie and Ari, the title characters of her first fashion film. “But he’s seen her perform in that club before.”

The story is simple: A motorcycle-jacketed skinhead (played by Michael Socha) follows a bombshell blonde performer (Dree Hemingway) down a dimly lit staircase and into her green room, where he is captivated watching her apply stage makeup at a vanity table. Ari notices Jonnie’s presence and returns the interest, having seduced him all along. “The reason Jonnie looks kind of dumbstruck when he sees Ari is yes, because she’s very beautiful, but also because he has the feeling that he knows her from somewhere and can’t say where,” says Nighy. “It’s that thing where you’ve seen somebody in a performance context and then can’t quite place them later, not sure if they’re a friend of a friend or if they’re famous.” Actually, that well describes how many people might know Mary Nighy.

Filmmaker Nighy first tried her hand at acting—a natural path, given her parents Bill Nighy and Diana Quick’s successful careers—and then concurrently started at the National Film and Television School. Sofia Coppola devotees will recognize Nighy from 2006’s Marie Antoinette, in which she played the queen’s longtime confidante Princesse Lamballe, dutifully positioned at Kirsten Dunst’s right hand for much of the film. “I found myself particularly inspired by Sofia Coppola,” Nighy says. “While I was on her set I wrote a short film of my own,” which eventually became Lulu and led to funding for another short. “At that point, I really wanted to train as a director.” Two years of film school helped her accumulate a body of work that reveal both Nighy’s interest in female protagonists and her careful attention to sound track (two things which, incidentally, are also trademarks of Coppola’s oeuvre). Nighy’s 2011 short Small Town Glory(above), combines those themes, hinging on the relationship between an aged female rocker and the young bartender who takes interest in her.

When Vogue commissioned Nighy to make a film inspired by the theme of this year’s Costume Institute Benefit, “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” she knew exactly in which direction to take it. “Punk to me is so much about music,” Nighy explains. “And since Vogue asked me to focus on hair and beauty, I immediately I thought of a character arriving in a dressing room and transforming into a kind of Debbie Harry figure. She is more the glam side of punk . . . It was important to us to emphasize color.”

The result is Dree Hemingway’s Ari, a name inspired by Ari Up, the late frontwoman of British band the Slits, “the only really successful all female punk band,” according to Nighy. (She and her cowriter Zoe Franklin, who also served as creative director on Jonnie & Ari, originally wanted to use a song by the Slits as the sound track, but eventually decided on another from the late-seventies era, “Suicide A Go Go” by Big In Japan, because “it’s got a good build to it”.) Nighy further explains: “I loved the idea of somebody witnessing that transformation and being quite seduced by it. So that’s where Michael’s character came in.” That would be Michael Socha, the actor best known for Shane Meadows’s 2006 skinhead drama This Is England, which was in part the inspiration for Jonnie.

The casting seemed especially fitting to Nighy because of its transatlantic duality: Socha is a native of Derby, in England’s East Midlands region, and Hemingway is a great-granddaughter of seminal American author Ernest. The point is reiterated in the title credits, the block lettering of which is filled in with the Union Jack for Jonnie and the Stars and Stripes for Ari. “We loved the idea of reflecting that punk was a movement with British and American parallels, and while it obviously means different things in those two contexts, I liked bringing it together with an American actress seducing a British actor.”

That Nighy makes Ari the agent of her erotic encounter, when coupled with the director’s tight camerawork and first-person perspective, further reveals her participation in the new tradition of female directors that Nighy most respects: Cate Shortland, Andrea Arnold, and, of course, Sofia Coppola. “They all have this ability to make you feel as if you are living and breathing what you are seeing. It’s never through theatrical set pieces, it’s subjective and puts you inside the film. It’s something I really respond to.”Click here to view Jonnie & Ari on Vogue.com.